Page 42 of Silver Elite

Fear explodes inside me.

“It won’t take long at all,” Ellis assures me while my heart careens inside my chest like a runaway horse. Thundering off a cliff of panic. “If you just want to lie back—”

“No!”

I don’t mean to raise my voice. It causes everyone to swivel their heads toward me. No one was paying attention before, but now all eyes are on me, and I curse myself for losing my cool.

I can’t let him heal me.

There is no fucking way I can let him heal me.

I swallow hard, my mind searching for a way to deflect his attention without raising suspicion. I know exactly what lies beneath all this scar tissue. A bloodmark that will expose me as their enemy.

Or at least the mark used to be there. I have no way of knowing whether it was fully burned off, or if it’s lying dormant beneath layers of skin like that famous underwater volcano that, according to the history books, swallowed half of the Lost Continents in less than an hour. I know of one Mod who tried cutting their bloodmark off and it turned out to be so many layers of skin deep that it left a hole in their hand.

Either way, I can’t take the chance that it’s still there. It exposes me not just as a Mod, but also as one of the most powerful Mods in existence. Uncle Jim went to great lengths to erase it.

And now this nosy asshole is about to undo all that hard, painful work in a heartbeat.

“No,” I warn when Ellis starts to place his hands on me. I shrug them off.

His eyebrows arch in surprise. “It must be painful.”

“It’s not.”

I’m not even lying. Yes, my thigh aches on rainy days, which I’ll never understand. Sure, there’s discomfort when the skin is stretched taut, and fine, sometimes the nerves in there forget they were incinerated and I’ll feel a phantom shock of pain if I move my leg wrong. But I can live with it. The pain has never been bad enough that I can’t ignore it.

I grab at my clothes. My hands are shaking. I feel the weight of Ellis’s gaze and it makes my skin prickle.

“If you don’t want me touching you so close to an intimate place, we could bring Soldier Struck over here. She can make sure nothing untoward happens.”

“That’s not the reason I don’t want it. I don’t mind the scars, okay? Go treat somebody else.”

“What’s going on here?” Cross strides over.

“He wants to heal my burns,” I snap.

“Okay…Is there a reason you’re resisting?”

“Yes. I don’t want them removed.”

Cross searches my face. “Darlington. Not sure I see the issue here.”

Panic claws at the edges of my consciousness as I scramble for an excuse, any excuse, to justify my refusal.

“With all due respect, I’d prefer not to,” I finally say, my voice wavering despite my best efforts to control it. My throat is so tight I can barely swallow around it. “I’m not going to pretend I didn’t have an accident as a kid.”

“This isn’t about pretending. It’s about healing you,” Ellis says.

“No, it’s about erasing a part of myself.”

My brain finally sees it. The way out. And my voice stops shaking. Growing steady.

“I know they’re ugly, but they’re part of me now. They remind me of where I’ve been, what I’ve endured. All these scars, and not just the burns, are memories.” I point out the faint white scar on the left side of my collarbone. “Like this one. I got it when this horrible kid, Oden, pushed me into a thornbush. A thorn ripped right through my shirt and tore a chunk of flesh when I was trying to crawl out. Later, when I was in upper school, Oden asked to take me on a date, and for a moment I forgot about how nasty he was in lower school. And then I noticed this scar in the mirror one day and it reminded me I couldn’t trust that asshole.”

The thornbush story is true. Everything else is horseshit. I didn’t need an old fading scar to tell me to reject Oden. But the story sounds good.

I stare down at my thigh, where the burn tissue crisscrosses the skin like a map of my past.

“These are part of me,” I repeat. “I would feel weird without them. So please, keep your hands off me.”

I hold my breath, willing them to see my sincerity, to take it for conviction rather than desperation.

Ellis nods. “As you wish, soldier,” he says, and relief floods my body when he moves on to treat the next soldier.

—

Later that night, Cross knocks on my door. Tonight is a pit night, but after fighting to save the scars Uncle Jim had inflicted on me, I felt oddly emotional, so I decided to stay in. I spent most of the night lost in memories. Those three years we spent in the darkness. The twelve years on the ranch. I miss him. So damn much.

Cross walks into my quarters, dark hair rumpled, a bottle of vodka cider in his hand. He’s a little unsteady on his feet.

“Are you drunk?” I ask in amusement.

“No, but I feel good.”

“So that’s a yes.”

He laughs. I enjoy that sound far too much.

“I’ve been thinking about something all day,” he says, setting the bottle on my desk. “Since the wellness checks.”

The next thing I know, he’s pulling off his white T-shirt. He tosses it on the small armchair where I like to curl up and read at night.

“Is there a reason you need to tell me your thoughts while shirtless?”

He grins, that dimple digging a deep hole in his cheek. He’s so sexy when he smiles. It makes him look so much younger. His usual expression—mocking and apathetic—lends him an air of maturity, but then he smiles at me, and I remember that he’s twenty-two.

“Give me your hand,” he says.

I play along and place my hand in his. It looks tiny in his palm, with his long fingers stroking my shorter ones. He presses my palm over his right pec and moves it back and forth.

“Am I supposed to be feeling anything?”

“Two years ago, there was a scar there. The size of a bottle cap.” He snickers. “Looked like I had two nipples.”

I can’t help but smile. “You asked Ellis to make it go away?”

“Yes.”

“How’d you get the scar?”

“My brother shot me with an arrow.”

My jaw drops. “What? Which brother?”

“Which one do you think?”

“You’re right, stupid question. Obviously it was Roe. How did it happen?”

“Hunting trip a couple of years ago. I was twenty, he was sixteen. The General wanted us to have some brother bonding time. I guess Roe complained that I never spent time with him. So we went into the woods with a couple of crossbows, split up to track a deer, and what do you know? Oops. He mistook me for a white coyote. Accidentally shot my ass.”

“Accidentally.”

“So he claims. With Roe, it could really go either way. I don’t think he hates me enough to kill me, but…”

“He’s jealous of you.”

“Always has been. My father…He worships my mother in a way that he never, ever did with Roe’s. He took care of her when she got pregnant, but he never gave a shit. There’s only one woman Merrick Redden will ever love. And that’s Vinessa.”

It’s the first time I’ve heard Cross say his mother’s name.

“That’s such a pretty name.” I hesitate. “How come she doesn’t go out in public?”

“He doesn’t like to expose her to that. He never did with us, either.”

I nod. The General always delivers his broadcasts alone. I don’t think I’ve even seen photos of him with his family at celebrations. I saw Vinessa Redden standing with him on the balcony of the Capitol once for Liberty Day fireworks, but other than that, the General keeps his family out of sight.

“He doesn’t take chances. He’s scared of assassination attempts. But I digress.”

“Right. Your psycho brother shot you in the woods.”

Cross snickers. “He did. And I always had this scar as a reminder I couldn’t entirely trust my brother. Either one of them.”

“Travis shot you somewhere else?”

He smiles faintly. “Something like that. Anyway, after the scar was gone and I wasn’t seeing it in the mirror every morning, I forgot about it.”

“The fact that he shot another recruit in cold blood wasn’t a good enough reminder?”

“No, and stop being a smart-ass.”

“Sorry.”

“All I’m saying is, you got me thinking earlier. About how we can’t erase our scars because we need them to remember.”

I realize I’m still touching his bare chest and can’t help but stroke his heavy pecs. He makes a sound of contentment.

“If you keep touching me…” he warns.

“What?” I say with a taunting smile. “What are you going to do?”

His eyes smolder. “I wasn’t done talking.”

“Oh, now you’re Mr. Chatty?”

“I guess you bring out that side in me.”

He captures my hand beneath his. Then, keeping it pressed to his chest, he slides it to his other pec, directly over his heart. I feel it hammering against my palm.

“They’re not ugly,” he says. “You said earlier that you know the scars are ugly, but they’re not.”

He gently pushes me toward the bedroom. The backs of my knees bump into the bed. I sink down onto the edge, and suddenly Cross is on his knees in front of me, pulling at my loose linen pants.

He licks his lips when my bare legs are revealed, but his eyes focus on my thigh. The puckered skin, the pink ridges.

“They’re not ugly.” His fingers skim over the burn tissue, tracing the textured ridges.

A wave of insecurity washes over me. “Got it,” I say, trying to shift away from his touch. “You don’t think they’re ugly.”

“I think they’re beautiful.”

“Now you’re messing with me.”

“No.” He runs his palm over the scarred expanse. “I don’t care if you got this from a pot of boiling water or an enemy attack in the Last War. It’s still a battle wound. A testament to how strong you are. It’s goddamn beautiful.”

My throat is dry now. And my heart stutters when he kisses the scar tissue.

It’s so intimate that it triggers a pang of discomfort, so I try to lighten the mood by saying, “Just so you know, there’s zero sensation there.”

Chuckling, he rests his other hand on my other thigh. The one unmarked by burns.

“How about over here? No sensation?”

“All the sensation,” I whisper, falling back on my elbows as he glides his hand between the juncture of my thighs.

His mouth is still on my burn when his finger slips inside me. I cry out from the pleasure that rocks my body.

“Goddamn beautiful,” he repeats, and then kisses his way to where I want him most.

—

He stays the night. It’s a rare occurrence. But he’s in my bed when I wake up, lying on his side, his arm crooked under his head. My gaze fixes on his tattoos. I’ve been up close and personal with them plenty of times since Cross and I started…enjoying each other. But my resolve to keep an emotional distance means refraining from digging deeper. It means I can’t ask why he chose wings and fire, or what those mystifying lines of script signify.

Memories of eternal snow.

When the wind turns against you.

A single second.

I’m an obnoxiously curious person, so the fact that I can’t make sense of those cryptic words eats at my brain like a worm in an apple.

What does it mean, damn it?

When I shift on the mattress, his eyes slit open.

“Did I wake you?” I murmur.

“No, I wasn’t asleep.”

I reach out and rub my fingertips over the stubble on his face. “You look messy in the morning.”

His lips quirk. “Yeah, I need a shave and a coffee.”

“You look tired. Did you have a bad sleep?”

“No. But I didn’t sleep much.”

“What kept you up?”

Rather than answer, he searches my face, those blue eyes flickering with an emotion I can’t read. “We’ll never fully trust each other, will we?”

The question takes me by surprise.

“Where is this coming from?”

“I don’t know. Just a thought I had during the night. Whether it’s possible to trust someone completely.”

“Cross. You’re too smart to ask a question like that, when we both know the answer is no, you can’t.”

“I know.” He rolls onto his back, sighing. “But man, imagine how fucking nice that would be.”

It would be more than nice. Trusting someone with my entire being. Ripping my chest open and letting them see inside. All the dark, ugly, twisted parts. All my secrets and fears and crippling insecurities. Showing them every part of me without fear of judgment or betrayal.

But the world doesn’t allow for such luxuries.

“You can trust me,” I tell him, nestling at his side. “Mostly.”

He snorts. “Mostly.”

“Uh-huh. You can mostly trust me.” I run my hand along the warm, sculpted flesh of his chest and enjoy the way he shivers. “You can trust me not to lie to you. Sometimes.”

“I’m honored.” His laughter is choked.

My fingers dance down his body, teasing his abs, following the tantalizing line of hair that arrows southward. “You can trust me to make you feel good.”

“Is that right?”

“Uh-huh.”

My mouth follows the path of my fingers, until I find him, hot and hard for me. I wrap my lips around him and am rewarded with a low moan.

In the back of my mind, I’m unable to shake the nagging feeling that I’m nearing a point of no return with Cross. That soon it will be too late to turn back, and this warm bubble that surrounds me when I’m with him will burst and destroy everything around me.

But for now, I push aside my doubts, choosing instead to focus on the fragile illusion of happiness.